Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and OFDMA wireless communication systems under IEEE 802.16 use a network of base stations to communicate with wireless devices (i.e., mobile stations) registered for services in the systems based on the orthogonality of frequencies of multiple subcarriers and can be implemented to achieve a number of technical advantages for wideband wireless communications, such as resistance to multipath fading and interference. Each base station emits and receives radio frequency (RF) signals that convey data to and from the mobile stations. Such an RF signal from a base station includes an overhead load, in addition to the data load (voice and other data), for various communication management functions. Each mobile station processes the information in the overhead load of each received signal prior to processing the data.
Under the current versions of the IEEE 802.16x standard for the OFDMA systems, every downlink subframe from a base station includes a preamble, a frame control header (FCH) following the preamble, and a downlink map (DL-MAP) following the FCH as part of the overhead load. The preamble includes information for searching a cell and a cell sector within a cell and for synchronizing a mobile station in both time and frequency with the received downlink signal. The FCH portion of the downlink subframe includes 24 bits with information on the downlink transmission format (e.g., the DL-MAP) and control information for the downlink data reception (e.g., allocation of the subcarriers in the current downlink frame). The DL-MAP specifies downlink data region allocation and burst profile information so that the DL data bursts in the OFDM/OFDMA frame may be correctly decoded. The first DL data burst is typically an uplink map (UL-MAP) containing similar allocation and burst profile information for uplink transmissions on a per-frame basis, which may also be considered as part of the control overhead.
The control overhead consumes both time and frequency resources in an OFDMA frame, and the control messages grow with the number of concurrent users (e.g., mobile stations) supported by a base station. Because these time and frequency resources are limited on a per-frame basis, greater consumption of these resources by the control overhead means there are fewer resources for data traffic. Moreover, because most control messages are encoded with the lowest coding rate so that these messages may be received by as many mobile stations as possible, a small increase in the size of the control messages leads to a considerably larger increase in the consumption of the frame resources. As a result, maximum data throughput of a mobile station will decrease exponentially as the number of concurrent users increases.